The Persistence of Youth: Oral Testimonies of the Holocaust

This volume is a collection of 15 first-person accounts of growing up during the Nazi era. The selections cover a broad range of personalities and circumstance. Included are testimonies from the daughter of an anti-Nazi German family, the son of a mixed marriage in Germany threatened with deportation, a German Gypsy who witnessed Mengele’s experiments, a Polish Jewish girl saved by her teacher, a Prague teenager escaping to Denmark and Sweden, a Polish Jewish youth in communist Siberia, a partisan, and eleven-year-old in Auschwitz, a young Yiddish actress exiled to Tashkent and a Polish Catholic child deported to work camps. Drawn from the Holocaust Oral history Archive of Gratz College, each testimony is a story of survival through defence, adaptation and resilience.